


supercell x season

by darth_fluffy



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: 2019 Hunter X Hunter Big Bang, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Spirits, Disabled Character, Falling In Love, Fantasy, First Kiss, First Love, Fluff and Angst, Illumi is a prick, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Magical Realism, Romance, Romantic Friendship, implied/referenced rural american christian culture in general, well "modern" its like the late 90s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-03-17 14:21:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18966997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darth_fluffy/pseuds/darth_fluffy
Summary: The summer before eighth grade, Gon Freecs meets a storm elemental.





	1. Chapter 1

On a forgotten, dusty plain in southern Oklahoma, the sky eats the earth alive. 

Trees snap. Crops are ripped from the ground. Here, a fence takes flight, its small white boards silhouetted against the black sky. There, the sky tosses a car.

The tornado leaves this: Houses, ripped apart like wet cardboard, the walls collapsed, the roof lying splintered across the lawn. A horse, trying to stand on legs shattered from its fall.  A lamppost, thrown like a javelin through a tree.

There were people, too.

And the tornado leaves a man and a boy. 

The man stands rail-thin, thin as the air itself, with blank, swirling eyes and inky black hair like the belly of the storm. The boy beside him sparks with lightning, his hair the fluffy white of the cloudtops, his eyes the deep blue of a squall.

“You did well, Kil.”

***

Whale Rock Lake, Texas, the townspeople agreed, had never really deserved its name. The “lake” in question was only chest-high at its deepest, and so choked with weeds it was more of a swamp than anything else. Humans tended to loathe it.

Cows, however, tended to love it—as did ducks and songbirds and mule deer, all flocking to the one steady source of water and shade in the region. Under the willows, the animals create their own secret world. Clouds of mosquitoes and gnats are born and die; squirrels race up trees; armadillos, deer, and jackrabbits sip from the shallows. Coyotes and bobcats prowl the edges of the pond, hoping to snag any unaware victims.

Gon had loved it, too. Once.

He sits slumped at the breakfast table, his chin in the palm of his left hand, spoon held loosely between what remains of his right forefinger and thumb as he idly stirs his cereal. Dimly, he hopes he won’t lose his grip. It would be embarrassing, having to fish around in the bowl to find it, and it would be all slippery from milk, now, too, so he’d probably lose his grip on it again. All the shiny burn scars made his fingers slicker. 

Gon looks out through the grimy, fly-covered window in the corner of the cottage. The lake sparkles, beyond their messy gulch of a backyard. It calls to him, telling him  _ come back. I miss you. _

Mito would be mad if he went swimming, he knows. She’d probably say _your hands are still healing_ and _there’s dangerous bacteria in_ _the wate_ r and _you could have gotten seriously sick_ and given him a nice long lecture about how he shouldn’t risk his life when he had such a bright future ahead of him, which if you defined “bright” by a town of only two thousand people, one stoplight, and a combined middle and high school that had lessons in an aluminum-roofed building that was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, well. She was right.

A bug skitters along the counter beside him, a ladybug, jewel-bright with deep black spots. “Hey,” Gon muses, the words mumbled, “whaddya think I should do? I’m just so  _ bored…” _

The bug simply wanders away.

Gon sits, staring at the counter for a long time. Finally, he hears the door unlatch, and his aunt steps in.

The spoon clatters into the cereal as he scrambles from his chair. “Aunt Mito, Aunt Mito!”

“Hm?”

“Can I go swimming today? The water looks really nice and it’s all warm out and my hands are feeling _so_ much better and it feels like it’s been _forever_ since I went please please _please…”_

“How’s your science project coming?”

Gon deflates.

“You have a deadline coming up, you know,” Mito continues, a light note of caution threading through her voice. “I know how hard it is for you to have to work over the summer, but the plan we agreed with your teachers was that you would be all caught up by the end of summer. In a year from now, you’ll be entering high school, and…”

“Grades are important, I  _ know _ .” Gon scratches the back of his neck and looks up at his aunt with pleading eyes. “But I’m just so sick of being in this house all the time…”

His voice trails off.

A silence falls between them, thick and heavy like a summer thunderstorm. He can almost hear all the things his aunt will not say welling up within her mind, the things he himself knows so bitterly but will not say. The words of  _ this is your own fault  _ and  _ you did this to yourself  _ and  _ if you had just been _ careful…

Gon looks out the window, at the sparkling, inviting lake beyond. If he hadn’t listened to Genthru and Razor—if he hadn’t held the firework while he lit it—he would be wading through the lake right now, soaked to the bone and covered in mud, grinning from ear to ear.

Even though it’s May, he feels cold.

He looks out the window for a long time. A warm, glistening drop trickles down his cheek.

Warm arms around him, holding him tight, rocking him gently, as if he were still her baby. He feels Mito bury her face in his hair, softly murmuring,  _ I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… _

_ No,  _ I’m  _ sorry,  _ he wants to tell her.  _ It was my fault. _

They stay that way for a long time. Neither one of them speaks. 

And then Mito presses a kiss to his forehead and murmurs, “It’ll be okay, Gon. I promise.”

He doesn’t respond.

***

Late that afternoon, the Weather Service sends out an ominously-worded bulletin warning of severe storms sweeping in that night. By the time the sun is falling,Gon can see the clouds as he stands out on the porch, rising up against the horizon like billowing towers, inky black and threaded with lightning. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and a cold wind slices the muggy late May air. 

_ Perfect. _

After an afternoon spent pretending to work on his science project, he had finally settled upon an idea upon reading the bulletin—and now, Gon stands holding a bucket with the handle clenched between his right forefinger and thumb, a folding lawn chair dangling by the strip from the crook of his left elbow, and a long spool of copper wire clenched between his teeth. All supplies for his very own homemade weather station.

_ I wonder if she’ll be mad... _

He nervously scans the driveway. Mito and Abe had told him they were going out for dinner that afternoon, and left him with a lonely house, the plateful of pizza now precariously balanced atop his supply bucket,and a promise to work well on his schoolwork and not make too much trouble. Both of those objectives—the schoolwork and the trouble—he is accomplishing right now.

His face split into a brilliant smile, Gon bounds down the steps of the porch and races down the lawn, letting his feet carry him heedlessly into the storm.

***

After a bit of struggle, he manages to unpack the buckets and get his makeshift weather station set up. A graduated cylinder for collecting rainfall (the carrying buckets would double as extra measurement in a pinch), the pinwheel with his patented Pinwheel-Spin-O-Meter to measure the strength of the wind, and his piece de resistance, a long loop of copper wire and a voltage tester.

Gon grins from ear to ear. In a minute, he would know the voltage of lightning.

The sky has long since faded into night, but the blue flickering from the clouds illuminates him, casting his world in brilliant blue-white moments. Thunder roars overhead with the voice of an angry beast.

_ Any moment now,  _ Gon tells himself, and tries to believe the words. He's been sitting here, shielded— _ mostly  _ shielded from the biting rain and furious, lashing, stick-throwing wind by a funny metal outhouse, the wire he’s threaded from the top of the building sprawling across the ground several feet away. It was the perfect catch for lightning.

Now all the lightning needed to do was actually  _ strike _ . 

Another blinding flash, and an earsplitting  _ crash  _ of thunder. The rain is harsher now, like tiny needles biting into his skin. 

The wind knocks his cylinder over, spilling the out the rain he’s collected. Gon rises, then heads over to the where he’s placed the bottle on the little cement ledge of concrete surrounding the shed, head bowed  as he struggles against the wind.

He only takes a few steps.

All around him, the rain stills. His skin tingles.

The hairs on the back of his neck rise.

A blinding flash of light. Heat.

A deafening, world shattering  _ boom. _

Then silence.

***

Gon blinks, and opens his eyes. His ears are ringing and they  _ hurt,  _ like a thousand cactus needles have been stuffed in there at once, and everything about him feels a little wrung out, as if he’s a towel that's been used as a paint rag one too many times. 

Gingerly, he sits up. Nothing broken, just sore…  _ My cylinder! _

He scrambles to his feet, then takes off at a stumbling run back to the outhouse—

And comes to a skidding halt as something blindingly, brilliantly  _ white  _ crashes into him.

They roll together, him and the white glowy thing, for a minute, before coming to a halt. Gon lands on top, on all fours, straddling the—roughly humanoid— _ thing _ , which still shines with a starlike glow. As he watches, its featureless glow dims, and resolves itself into the face of a boy.

A boy more or less his age, with wide blue eyes and fluffy white cloudlike hair. Skin so pale that Gon can clearly see the blue veins at his wrists, and a scowly, petulant expression bold on his face, as if Gon had come along and ruined  _ his  _ perfectly fine night.

“Oh!” Gon springs to his feet, letting the boy stand as well. He reaches out, with his one-fingered right hand, heedless of the little tendril of shame knotting in his gut.

The boy takes it anyway, and says nothing about the scars.

“Are you okay? Sorry I sorta knocked you down there, I didn’t see you…”

“It’s okay.” The other boy yawns as he stuffs his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “I’m fine.”

“Are you new here?” Gon asks, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. “We don’t get many visitors around here, it’s a pretty small town—a  _ really  _ small town, actually, but… What’s your name? How did you  _ get  _ out here when it’s all rainy like this? Are you cold? You must be  _ soaked _ . Were you out here watching the storm, too? Didya get any cool pics?” A thought enters his brain. “Hey, where  _ were  _ you before the lightning hit? I didn’t see anyone else around—are you  _ sure  _ you’re okay? Do you need any help getting home? A place to stay? I live really close to here and my aunt’s out tonight and I’m  _ sure  _ she won’t mind if I let you stay—”

The boy’s eyes are locked on his own, wide and sparkling and so blue Gon feels like he’s falling into the sky. His breath catches, his heart beginning to pound. 

The wind and rain have stopped, enveloping the two of them in silence. Above their heads, a faraway star twinkles.

“Because you look lonely! And you’ve been out here and you’re all alone and cold and wet—“

“I’m fine. I can manage. You don’t need to help me.”

“But I  _ want _ to!” Gon steps forward and clasps the ethereal boy’s hand in what’s left of his own. 

The mysterious boy’s eyes widen, the light flowing off from his body growing brighter for just a second. “It’s really stupid, you know,” he begins, a wide, stretched,  _ almost _ -tough grin broadening on his face, “to care about strangers that much.” He takes several stumbling steps back and leans against the wall of the outhouse, his arms folded behind his head. “Sounds interesting, though. I haven't… really been in a lot of other people houses before.” The sky-eyed boy looks Gon up and down, pinning him to the dark brambles of the swamp behind him like a butterfly on a collection board. “And besides, you sound cool.”

_He thinks I’m cool!_ Gon has no reason for the little fireworks-like feelings that bubble up in his stomach, but they’re _there,_ and definitely not going anywhere as long as this strange shining boy is hanging around. “Come on!” He reaches out and clasps the boy’s hands tightly between the palms of his own, then takes off running, pulling the starlight boy along. “I’ll show you my home!”

As the two of them run, the wind picks up into a gentle breeze, seeming to push them along with gentle hands. The angry clouds above their heads recede to reveal a sky of deep blue and blazing with stars. They race through puddles and slide through mud and finally emerge at Mito’s door, their sides heaving as they double over laughing.

“Wow! You run  _ fast!” _

The lightning boy— _ Gon’s  _ lightning boy—straightens, a small, tight smile growing in his face, as if he’s a little bit amused. “Fast. I guess you could say that.” 

“What’s your name, by the way? My name’s Gon.”

“Killua.”

“Killua? That’s a  _ really  _ pretty name! Where’s it from?”

Killua pulls his hand away—quickly, as if he’s been shocked—and mumbles something unintelligible. A loud gust of wind blows between them, its hollow roar and the clattering of Mito’s wind chimes drowning out any word they might say.

_ Did I do something wrong?  _

Silence.

“Hey, Killua,” Gon says at last, a lilt to his voice, “come on inside and I’ll show you how to build the most  _ awesome  _ pillow fort you’ve  _ ever  _ seen.”

Gon fishes the key ring out of his pocket, hooks his finger through it, then leans down and tries to awkwardly jam it in the lock. It takes a while—the stumps of his fingers aren't nearly long or nimble enough to control the key. After nearly ten minutes of Gon standing there, futilely fiddling with the key and feeling Killua’s eyes boring into him this whole time, he finally kneels down and grasps the key between his teeth.

The harsh taste of metal floods his mouth. The splinters of the old wooden porch dig into his bare kneecaps.

Killua still hasn’t said a word.

With the sweat pooling on his back, Gon manages to get the door unlocked. He straightens, then turns the handle, leads Killua in through the open door, and switches on the light,

Light floods the room, revealing his and Mito’s living quarters: the coatrack with Gon’s fluorescent green raincoat still hanging there— _ so that’s where I left it!— _ the boxlike TV with its slightly cracked screen sitting proudly on top of a battered wooden chest of drawers, VCR by its side. The doily-draped pleather couch, the knickknack-laden shelves, the Formica dining set in the corner piled high with board games.

“Wow. So  _ this _ is what it’s like.”

_ Has he not seen someone’s home before?  _ Gon steals a glance at Killua, still perched on the threshold of their doorway,  gazing out at their living room with wide, alert eyes. In the light, he doesn't seem  _ quite  _ so ethereal—the glow coming out of his body is unrecognizable, and his eyes doesn’t seem so infinitely blue. Gon resents it a bit—he wishes that Killua could remain that breathtaking boy he’d seen right after the lightning forever. “You like it?” 

A pause as Killua gathers his words.“I mean, it’s nice. I guess.” He saunters over to the couch and sits curled up on the arm like a cat. “Comfy.”

‘Actually, don’t sit there! Aunt Mito doesn’t like when you sit on the arm.” Killua regards him with a blank stare. “She says it weakens the furniture.”

Killua smirks a bit at that , but leans back so that he flops onto the couch cushions with his legs in the air. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem!” Gon bounds across the room and flops down on the couch beside Killua, causing him to bounce slightly. “So whaddya wanna do?  We have the lake out back and it’s really cool, there’s lots of bugs and stuff. And it’s great for swimming in when it’s hot out. Not very deep, though, so Mito won’t let me dive—Mito’s my aunt, by the way. She’s  _ really  _ cool. But strict at times and she can be scary if I mess up or do something dumb...” Gon pauses to recalibrate his train of thought. “Anyway, we have the VCR and some movies if you want to watch anything, though if you want to record things you have to check with Aunt Mito first. She doesn’t like me watching shows with too much violence. And we have board games in the cupboard, and pizza in the fridge, and if you want to use the computer you can ask Mito when she gets home—”

Killua rolls on his side and sits up. “Wow.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, nothing. I just didn’t realize being a human was so complicated.”

_ Human?  _ Their eyes meet and Gon feels a shiver run down his spine.

In a sort of strange, lopsided way, it made sense. Killua had appeared from nowhere, just like a ghost. He had those ocean-blue eyes, too deep and rich to be human. And he’d  _ glowed,  _ shining like a star fallen to earth.

_ Or like... _

_ Lightning. _

“Killua… you made the storm come, didn’t you?”

Killua’s voice doesn’t waver. “Yes.”

A memory flickers through Gon’s mind: the destruction of Huntsville, just across the lake on the Oklahoma border. He’d watched, that night, huddled in their tiny crawl space, as Mito had listened to the radio, hearing the announcer describing in strident tones the tornado swallowing the earth.

Six people had died.

“ _ Cool!  _ Did you make the lightning come too?”

“Yep.” Killua smiles broadly, like a shark, as he flops back against the back of the couch. “But I’m not very good at making storms yet.” His expression softens, his smile fading, his eyes growing heavier. “And I’m not very good at being a storm.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because it’s stupid.” Gon’s lightning boy looks at the carpet and scuffs his sneaker-clad feet, leaving two distinct smudges in the beige. “All we ever do is destroy.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

Killua raises his head with a start. A faint blush colors his cheeks as he meets Gon’s eyes, his lips falling open into a round O. “Why not?”

“Because… lots of storms are really pretty! The clouds swirl and turn all dark and gray, like giant boulders in the sky, and sometimes they make the  _ craziest  _ shapes, like cotton balls or UFOs and one time I saw a  _ manta _ ray. And the lightning is  _ super awesome— _ at night you can see it flickering in the clouds and it turns the sky around it all blue and purple. Oh, and storms make rainbows, too, with all those shimmery colors just hanging there in the sky, and sometimes you even see a  _ double  _ rainbow, where the color is sorta echoey—oh, and upside down, too! Like a shadow, and all the plants look so lush and green after it rains, they’re almost  _ glowing.”  _ Gon smiles, a little sheepishly. Killua’s deep blue gaze is still focused directly on him, and suddenly it’s hard to inhale, like his chest is wound tight. “Killua… have you ever made a rainbow?”

Killua drops his gaze, his blush deepening. “No. I mean, I don’t know.” He exhales, long and thin, as if he’s sucking water through a straw. “My… the other storms wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t want me too.”

“Why not?”

“Because… do you really think storms can be pretty?”

“Well, you’re a storm, and  _ you’re _ pretty!”

“And you’re stupid,” Killua snaps, his face turning deep pink. “You can’t just  _ say _ stuff like that.”

“But it’s true.”

“Are  _ all _ humans as simple as you?”

“Okay,  _ fine _ . I’m simple. But it’s  _ true.”  _ Gon feels what’s left of his hands itch with the desire to reach out and touch Killua—his hand or his shoulder or his chin, Gon doesn’t care. “Storms are beautiful.”

“Just because they’re beautiful doesn’t mean they can’t hurt people,” Killua says, very quietly. 

“Storms don’t always hurt people. And people hurt people, too, just as much as the storms.”

“You’re weird.” Killua stretches—slowly, languidly, like a cat—then slides off the couch and sits on the floor. “But you’re kinda cool.” He yawns, a tuft of white hair falling into his eyes. “I expected humans to be... different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. Less… bright, I guess. Not as vibrant.”

“Thanks!”

Killua pokes him in the thigh. “It’s  _ not  _ a  _ compliment,  _ idiot!”

“It  _ sounded _ like one.” Gon meets Killua’s eyes to find that he’s smiling. “You’ve never seen a rainbow from the ground before?”

Killua shakes his head.

“Then I’ll  _ show  _ you and you can see how bright it is!” Gon exclaims. “And we’ll go puddle jumping and we'll get some worms and go fishing—the fishing on the lake is always the best after a big storm, and we can go sliding on the grass when it’s all slick—“

Killua’s sharp intake of breath. 

“And I'll show you how the clouds turn pink and gold at sunset, and the lightning at night, and you… Wait. Can you smell things?”

“Smell?”

“Like…”  _ Does he even need to breathe?  _ “You know, when you put your nose to something and breathe in?”

‘What kind of things do you smell?”

Gon scratches the back of his neck. “Um, I don’t know. Anything you want to, really. But maybe not skunks. They're gross”

Killua giggles a little. “Be careful who you say that around. Skunk spirits are easily offended.”

“ _ Skunk _ spirits?”

“Sure!” Killua beams and hops back onto the couch. “There’s all  _ sorts  _ of spirits. Star spirits and sun spirits and water spirits and tree spirits and spirits for pretty much  _ all _ the plants and animals out there. You’d  _ never  _ be able to meet them all.” 

“Try me.”

“I don’t know,” Killua says, a lilt to his voice and a bright, mischievous smirk slowly spreading on his face. “Some of us are pretty fast…”

“Oh. So you’re like real-world Pokémon then.”

“ _ No— _ wait, what’s Pokémon ?”

“Oh, I’ll show you! Come on!” Gon scurries across the living room to Mito’s bedroom, Killua following close behind. He retrieves his game boy from Mito’s sock drawer, then spends a good fifteen minutes looking for the cartridge before admitting defeat. “Killua!”

“Yeah?” The shout comes from the kitchen.

“I couldn’t find the Pokémon game, but I found Greed Isl—“ Gon enters the kitchen to find Killua buried nose-first in a tub of strawberry ice cream. “Huh?”

Killua whips his head up, a little glob of ice cream clinging to his nose. “Oh, sorry. I was just… smelling stuff.”

Gon grins and skips across their slick linoleum floor. “It’s okay! But you know what the  _ best  _ thing to do with ice cream is?” He flings open the silverware drawer and fumbles around for two spoons. “Take a scoop and put it in your mouth.”

Killua complies, scooping out a chunk of ice cream and bringing it to his lips. As he closes his mouth around the spoon, his eyes go wide with surprise. “It’s  _ cold _ !”

Gon simply grins.

“Ith  _ wonderful,”  _ Killua says around his mouthful of pink mush, and when he smiles, there’s a softness to it that Gon hasn’t seen on him before. “Do you have any more?”

“Yes. But you need to eat vegetables too.” Gon sticks his tongue out. “Otherwise, Mito will get mad at me.”

***

Twenty minutes later, Killua has decided that vegetables are his  _ least  _ favorite type of food. Chocolate reigns supreme, followed by strawberry ice cream, then milk, then pizza, then vegetables and tuna fish sharing the venerable Mud Tier. Gon had explained the whole thing with a  _ Storms need warm air and water to live, right? Well, this is our air and water. _

And then Killua had suggested an Oreo-snarfing contest, which had left both boys with unhappy stomachs and Gon spending a considerable amount of time in the bathroom making smells  _ much  _ less wonderful than strawberry ice cream. 

(Killua, for his part, had simply went outside and turned into a cloud, leaving a puddle of chewed-up—not digested—Oreos on the ground.)

_ There’s so many things I didn’t know about being a human,  _ Killua muses while lying on the carpet, staring up at the white light on the ceiling _. So many things I didn’t know  _ existed…

White. Everything was white, and so  _ bright.  _ Like day, even though the sky outside the house was dark.

_ Is that a sun spirit? Did he catch one? Like Pokémon? _

A  _ click  _ of the bathroom door and Gon emerges, the bright expression on his face a contrast to the absolutely  _ horrible  _ smell—somewhere between a skunk and a mucky lake—flooding out of the little porcelain-draped room behind him.

Gon’s pace quickens as soon as he sees Killua, and in a second, he’s flopped down on the carpet beside Killua, arms folded behind his head in a makeshift pillow. Gon turns his head to look at Killua, eyes the color of the late afternoon light seeming to see into his core. “Whaddya wanna do now?”

Killua wants to, hopes to,  _ tries  _ to sound cocky, but what comes out of his mouth is far more honest than he intends. “I don’t know.” A pause. “It’s all so new.”

“Oh. Being a human.”

“Yep.”

Stillness, broken only by their quiet breaths. 

“What’s it like being a storm?”

“I dunno. What’s it like being a human?”

Gon giggles, his lips curving up as twin dimples appear by his chin. “I don’t really know? I know we can’t fly, and we can’t make lightning, the way you can.”

_ Flying. Is that what it is?  _ Killua thinks back to standing on the cloudtops, paying no attention to the green-bottomed void swirling beneath his feet. Up there, everything had been so  _ white,  _ white and blue with the sun beating down and the clouds sending all that too-harsh light back up.  _ I never knew there was so much  _ life _ down here. _

“Being a storm is…” Killua struggles for words. “Storms can’t live far away from the warmth, and if the air is too heavy, we can’t grow either. We’re weak. So we have to go where the wind spirits take us. But other than that, we can do what we want. We usually stay within the air…”

“Have you been down to the ground before?” 

He had. He’d taken the form of a smaller, weaker tornado and watched as Illumi carved a mile-wide path of destruction through the plains, tearing trees and houses and humans apart with impunity. “Sort of.”

“Oh.” Gon’s silent swallow is barely noticeable.

“Yeah.”

“What do you want to do? When you’re human, I mean.”

_ Mostly stay with you.  _ The words bubble up inside him, unwanted and unbidden. Killua gulps back the sudden lump in his throat. “I guess... I want to see what there is to do when you’re a human. I want to play Pokémon and Greed Island, and eat more chocolate bars and strawberry ice cream—“

“No Oreos?” Gon interrupts, a teasing lilt to his voice. 

Killua grins back, and pokes him in the side. “Well… maybe less.”

Gon sticks out his lower lip. “Well, it was  _ your  _ idea.”

“Yes, but you agreed. With your eyes.”

“Only because  _ you  _ made me want to win.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Did not.” 

“Did too.”

“Did not.” Killua flicks him  on the forehead, then turns himself back into a cloud and races to the other side of the room. “And if you wanna win, you have to catch m—“

Gon springs up and takes after Killua with surprising speed.

Killua waits until the very last second before zipping away again, Gon’s face drooping with some weird cross between joy and frustration. Killua smirks at him from the place Gon had called a  _ kitchen— _ and then Gon is racing towards him with such speed that makes Killua think for half a second that he’s part spirit himself, knocking over a small brown box and the glowing cylinder on top of it. His eyes flying wide, Gon skitters to a halt and glances at the crash.

_ Perfect.  _

He uses the distraction to become wind again and shoots across the room, landing in a little side space. The white wall above him is lower here, and the room is narrower, too, with no gap looking out on the night outside. On the three walls other than the archway he can see two wooden planks, nearly the height of the ceiling  and with shiny metal studs on them, blocking another gap.

_ “Killuaaaa!”  _ The sound of running feet, and laughter sparkling in Gon’s voice. “Where  _ aaaarrrre  _ youuuuu?”

Killua giggles, ducking back into the shadows. He feels…  _ light,  _ somehow lighter than he’s  _ ever _ felt, even when he’s let go of the rain he’s holding, even when the wind blows him to the sky.  _ I never knew. How much fun being a human is. _

Heavy footsteps as a dark green blur shoots through the doorway—then Gon stutters to a halt, looking from side to side like a nervous deer. Killua smirks—and crouches to spring.

Gon has barely a second to turn.

And then Killua leaps on him, throwing his arms around him, their cheeks smooshing together as the two boys spin, wobbling together like a top above the scuffed wood floor, Gon’s arms settle around Killua’s back, embracing him as Gon’s shoulders shake with laughter.

The come to a halt.

Gon is still holding him. 

Gon is warm, so,  _ so  _ warm in his arms, like he’s touching the surface of the sun.  _ Are all humans warm like this?  _ Unconsciously, Killua leans into the touch, his hands pressing into Gon’s back. He can feel Gon’s chest moving as he takes in air, can sense a strange throbbing deep within him.  _ There’s so much I didn’t know. _

And then Gon raises himself up on his tiptoes to more evenly hug Killua, wrapping his arms around Killua’s neck. Storms need warmth. That much, Killua knows.

And Gon is warm, and here, and  _ real,  _ and maybe being a human isn’t so bad after all.

They stay in that hallway, hugging each other tightly, for nearly a minute.  

The click of a latch unlocked.

Gon disentangles himself from Killua’s embrace and steps back to look him in the eye. “Oh… shoot, my aunt’s home.” His brow crinkles. “Killua… I’m pretty sure she would be mad if she caught me having friends over without her, so…”

Killua blinks. “Friends?”

“Yep! It means we care about each other, and do stuff together, and hang out and have fun, and we help each other when we’re upset or sad or have a problem!” 

_ Illumi,  _ Killua had said once, back when he was younger,  _ what’s the human world like?  _

And Illumi has explained how the humans killed each other over the colors of their skin, how they slaved away at mundane jobs, clinging to their hollow, pointless lives with the fierceness of someone believing a lie.

_ He never told me  _ this.

Gon’s eyes are warm, his smile bright. And Killua can sense the genuine, tender ring of truth behind his words—and thinks, for just a second, that that might be enough.


	2. Chapter 2

Ever since the night of the storm, something within her son has changed.

Mito catches him staring up at the clouds, lost in thought. Oftentimes, he seems to not be really  _ there _ —his body is with her, but his mind wanders, as if he’s longing desperately to leave their house and street and dusty little town far, far behind him.

During the first severe storm since Gon was almost struck by lightning, Mito comes home to see him sitting on the front porch, hands folded in his lap, staring up at the sky, heedless of the cold rain lashing at his face. There’s no book, no radio or CD player that she can see, and his special Game Boy she’s rigged up is nowhere in sight. 

“Gon?”

“Oh, sorry, Aunt Mito.” He hops out of the chair. “I’ll go fold the laundry like you asked.”

_ Well, that’s good, but…  _ “what on earth are you  _ doing  _ sitting in the storm like this?”

“I was.” Gon swallows hard, and looks at his feet. “Waiting for someone.”

“Gon.” Mito huffs a breath and shifts her weight from side to side, a fat knot of worry clenching itself within her heart. She says, as gently as she can, “Who do you think would be coming over on a night like this?”

“Um…” She sees him swallow and stand up artificially straight, his remaining fingers twitching. “No one. It’s not important. Bye.”

***

Gon half-asses his way through the science project and returns to the long unending stretch of days that has become his life, counting the dust specks in the window and watching TV and trying to play games on his Joystation with his remaining fingers.

_ Killua. _

The name—the ethereal boy with the wide blue eyes and cloudlike hair, that moment where Killua had taken his hands and said nothing about the scars, the way they’d laughed that night as they’d chased each other—stays in his mind, like a picture frozen in time on the wall. The memory keeps him company as the days pass, as he stays in the house, doing homework and chores and never bothering Mito about going outside. 

They make him feel light. 

Gon isn’t blind. He can see the way his aunt shoots a worried sidelong glance at him whenever he stares into space, at the way he eagerly checks the weather report every morning, the way he studies the clouds like a hawk. In those moments, Gon imagines  _ just _ how he’ll introduce her to Killua, exactly the way he’ll look at her and smile, and put his arm around Killua’s shoulders and say  _ he’s my friend. _

And Killua’s eyes would shine, lighting up in that sparkling-ocean way of his, and he’d blush, and maybe start glowing with that soft, pearlescent light of his. He’d probably elbow Gon in the side and call him an idiot, but it would be worth it.

_ When can I see him again? _

***

He’s lying in bed, a few nights later, watching the lightning streak through the sky, when he sees Killua again. 

The world outside his window glows  _ white— _ and, for just a second, Gon thinks he sees the form of a boy, silhouetted in the glowing light.

A  _ crack  _ of thunder so loud it leaves Gon’s ears ringing and aching for several minutes after.

His bedside lamp goes dark.

Gon tosses aside the comic book he’d smuggled under the sheets, then flings himself out of bed and scampers over to the window, a wide grin on his face.

Killua is here.

The striking lightning has ignited a fire in the grass a few feet away. Gon glances over it, noticing the way the rain sends little puffs of steam up where it falls on the fire, the way the sparks dance on the driving wind.

_ Is he here? _

Gon doesn’t have to wait long. Above the spreading flames, he sees a brilliant ball of light emerge, hovering, then zipping back and forth erratically. Something  _ leaps  _ within his heart—and before he knows it, Gon has thrown open the window and is calling out, “Killua!”

The ball of light zips over to the window, morphing into Killua, who starts running as soon as his feet touch the ground. He’s back in the white shirt and purple shorts he’d worn the last time they’d hung out—Gon wonders if it’s his favorite outfit, or simply the only clothes he knows how to conjure. Killua rushes to the window, his eyes brighter, little flashes of lightning crackling around him.  _ Pretty… _

“You’re staring,” Killua says by way of greeting, looking very much like a cat who might swat Gon on the nose.

“Can’t help it.” Gon grins, full and cheekily. “You glow too much.”

Killua blushes and ducks his head, a gesture so humanlike Gon almost forgets he’s a storm. “Are you like this around  _ every  _ human you meet?”

Gon sticks his tongue out. “You’re not a human, are you?”

Killua chokes back a laugh. “Nope.” His expression softens, his smile losing its cockinesses as he reaches through the open window and takes Gon by the wrist. “Come on. There’s something I wanna show you.” 

Killua pulls on his wrist—and then Gon is being yanked headfirst through the window, the rush of air around them stealing the breath from his lungs. “Huh— _ whaaa!” _

Killua merely laughs, his cotton-white hair tousled by the wind.

And then they’re  _ flying _ , skimming by just a few feet above the ground, his and Killua’s strides falling on nothing but a thin cushion of air.

Gon’s heart practically leaps into his throat. “Killua!” he calls, his voice straining to be heard over the rushing wind. “This is  _ amazing!” _

“You like it?!” Killua shouts back, his lips curled up into a broad infectious grin.

“Yeah!”

“I just learned it!”

_ “Cool!  _ Can you go faster?!”

“ _ Faster?! _ ” Killua shoots back, his blue eyes widening a little.

_ “Yeah!” _

Gon barely has the breath to shout.

And then the world is racing past him in a blur, the stars turning to streaks, the wind rushing alive and fierce against his face. Gon tries to cry  _ Killua,  _ but the air swallows up the sound. The skin beneath Killua’s hands on his wrist seems to throb with lightning of its own.

_ I wish I could grab onto you like this. _

A tree. 

Right in their path. 

Killua swerves—and lets go of Gon. 

A sudden thrilling drop, and then Gon’s back hits the water with a sharp  _ splash.  _ His feet hit the muddy bottom of the lake, and he comes up spluttering, shaking the water and muck out of his hair. “Killua!”

“Huh?” The cocky little noise comes from  _ above. _

Gon jerks his head up to see a very small storm cloud hovering almost directly overhead. Lit by tiny sparks of lightning, it glows an ethereal blue-white like a spirit from a dream. 

“Killua?” Gon breathes.

The clouds descends, gradually morphing into the shape of a boy—first a rough humanoid profile, then one with features gradually forming. Color spreads, turning the cloud boy’s skin a delicate peach, his shorts a deep purple, his eyes a rich sapphire. 

Gon gasps. “So I  _ wasn’t  _ lying!”

Killua’s descent comes to a halt just above the surface of the lake. As his toes brush the surface, they create tiny ripples in the watery, starlit mirror. “Lying about  _ what?”  _

“You—storms—really  _ are _ pretty!”

Killua ducks his head, a blush burning on his cheeks. “Idiot. I bet you’ve never seen any of the  _ other  _ storms.” His voice is soft, quiet, with no bite to it. “I bet you haven’t seen it when the sky turns all dark, and the clouds start spinning and rip up everything in their path.”

“I have.”

Killua's eyes go wide. “Th-then you’re an idiot.”

“Well, not so much  _ those  _ storms,” Gon says with a sheepish chuckle, putting one hand to the back of his head. “Aunt Mito tells me to stay in the basement during those. But—” Unconsciously, he reaches up to grasp Killua’s slender ankle, then remembers his wounds and pulls back his hands, ducking his  gaze.

Silence.

In the bushes, the crickets chirp.

“If you’re a storm, how come you haven’t hurt me?” 

“Because…” Gon sees Killua swallow as he looks down, fingers idly playing with the hem of his shirt. Killua slowly begins to drift backwards and  _ up,  _ his toes no longer brushing the surface of the water. “You’re… I like being around you, I guess.”

_ I guess.  _

Gon flinches.

“I’ve never known a human before. And there’s not a lot of storms my age.” Killua’s words sound very far away, like he’s ripping them from a place so deep inside him that they have never seen the light. “So I haven’t really made any friends.”

The fat crescent of the moon comes out from behind a wisp of cloud, bathing both of them in light. In the moonlight, Killua’s hair seems to almost _ glow.  _

_ But then, he glows anyway. _

And, in that moment, Gon thinks he could spend an eternity just gazing up at Killua. His ghostly fingers throb with phantom pain, longing to reach out and touch. Distantly, he wonders what it would be like to hold Killua, to reach out and pull him into his grasp. Would Killua have a heartbeat, throbbing there beneath his skin?

“Killua… what was it that you wanted to show me?”

Killua’s face blossoms into a grin. “Well,” he says, bobbing back down, his arms folded over his chest, “do you know what ball lightning is?”

“Ball lightning… isn’t that the one with the glowy floaty things?”

“Yup,” Killua says, trying and failing not to beam. “Didya see me when I came here? I just learned how to do that.” His grin goes broader, tiny sparks of lightning crackling around him as he stretches out his hand to Gon. “C’mon. I can’t do it while you’re in the water.”

Gon reaches out—shyly, hesitantly, half wondering if Killua could see his scars, if he would even know what they meant. Above him, Killua’s eyes widen as he lets out a soft gasp—then they  turn doubtful again as he eyes Gon’s hand, lightly biting his lower lip.

Gon smiles up at his storm, his light.

Fingers caress his scars. Gon gives a little gasp, and looks up to see Killua’s eyes against his own, blue against gold. 

_ He doesn’t care. _

Even scarred as he is, Killua still holds him.

Gon’s heart leaps. Gritting his teeth, he forces his aching, stiff index finger and thumb to wrap around Killua’s hand, the bronze of his skin a stark contrast to Killua’s pale cream. Killua’s hands aren’t warm like a human’s; they flicker between warm and cool as the lightning within him flares, and his skin is silken and slightly damp, as if he’s been wandering through the prairie on a misty morning. 

As if he’s the mist himself.

_ I never knew one touch could feel like this. _

Clouds brew above them, cutting off the moon. In the darkness he feels Killua tug on his hand, sees his softly luminescent form begin to drift back across the water. Gon follows him, step by step, feeling the lake muck leak through his shoes, the cold water soaking his shirt. They step out into dry land, where Gon pulls off his sodden shirt, balls it up into a makeshift pillow, then leans back against a sloping boulder, his arms and shirt folded behind his head. “Okay, Killua,” Gon calls, a wide grin on his face, “show me! I wanna see!”

A faint glow from behind the trees—and then Killua emerges, running one hand through his wind-tousled hair. He steps across the clearing towards Gon, a small mischievous grin on his face, the whisper of his footsteps in the leaves too soft for any human. 

“Okay.” Killua sits down beside him and leans against the stone. “It’ll be a bit. I have to make the clouds form first.”

“Ah.”

The two of them fall silent, the only sounds their breaths and a low, promising wind. 

“I’m glad you came back, Killua.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because…” Gon sits up straighter and pulls one hand out from behind his head, staring at his injured palm in the murky darkness. “I’ve been... sorta alone for a long time here. There aren’t a lot of humans living in this part of the plains, and I don’t really get along with most of the kids at school—“

“School? What’s school?”

“Something bad. Anyway…” The feelings that swim within his chest at the thought of Killua are too big, too bright to be so easily put into words. “I always wanted a friend. I have my aunt to play with, and all the animals in the lake… but it never really felt like enough, y’know?”

He hears Killua’s breathing change, hears him grasp at the leaves as he continues on, “And then… I met you.”

Killua stiffens. “Don’t  _ say  _ stuff like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” Killua’s voice grows quieter and choked. “A lot of the storms aren’t like me.” Thunder rumbles in the distance, low and ominous, and a cold biting wind kicks up, sending a flechette storm of leaves at the two boys. 

Killua is suddenly very still.

“Gon…?”

The coldness in his storm’s voice turns Gon’s blood to ice. “Killua, is everything ok—“

_ “Gon,”  _ Killua hisses under his breath as he presses one finger to Gon’s lips. Gon takes the hint, swallowing nervously, his wounded hands grasping at the leaves. 

Killua stands up. “This isn’t my storm.”

“But didn’t you just say…”

“I mean, it’s mine. But there’s another storm here.”

A note of ice runs through Gon’s blood at the words. “What do you mean…?”

“I mean—“ Killua takes him by the wrist, yanking him roughly to his feet—  _ “run.  _ As fast as you can home. I don’t want to be seen with you.” 

“W-wh—“

“Just  _ do it,”  _ Killua hisses, his blue eyes crackling with lightning in the dark. “You’ll be caught outside in a  _ tornado  _ if you don’t do what I say.”

Gon gulps. 

And then Killua is gone, leaving nothing but a swirl of wind and mist.

A bright flash of blue lightning from the western horizon—and then Gon feels the loud, low bass of thunder echoing through his chest.

He turns.

And runs.


	3. Chapter 3

As Killua sheds his human form and steps once more into the sky, the air knots within him, filling him up with dark, brooding clouds.

Storms tower through the sky around him. The air twists.

He  _ feels,  _ rather than _ hears,  _ the thunder, feels the long, deep rumbling shudder through his core, the heat of the lightning turning the water droplets inside him to steam.

“You’re back.”

Killua whips around in surprise. In the brief flashes of lightning, he can see the wind-lashed slope of the supercell knot itself into something vaguely resembling the face of a human man, his long, cobweb-like tendrils of hair spreading out in a dark halo around his head. 

Killua doesn’t know why Illumi insists on taking the form of a human when he despises them so much. He supposes he doesn’t care enough to find out.

“Where were you?”

“I was making the storm on my  _ own _ ,” Killua says with as much of a bite as he can muster. “You didn’t have to interfere.”

“I just wanted to make sure you were alright, Kil.” The other storm’s voice turns silken, fluid, like the coil of a snake. 

The clouds around Illumi shift, wrapping around Killua like vines. Killua shudders.

“After all, you took a  _ terribly _ long time getting back.” 

The other storm’s voice is like ice. 

Killua recoils, the air inside him twisting, the clouds beneath him starting to drop. “The sky was clear well before you returned, both two weeks ago and now. Might I ask why?”

The foot of the storm below Killua curls up into a narrow, darting funnel cloud, inching toward the ground as if it could escape from the sky.

_ He can’t know. _

Killua can see it all so  _ clearly— _ the way the air would knot around Illumi once he learned of Gon, the way his voice would drop as he said  _ why do you care so much about that little mortal? He’s a hypocrite, as all mortals are—a hypocrite, and a weak little ape who dreams of grandeur. He means nothing to you. _

_ No, Killua  _ tries to say, but the words knot inside of him, forming a hard, choked ball.  _ You’re wrong. You’re wrong you’re wrong you’re  _ wrong…

Images flash through his mind—the cozy home where he and Gon had stayed drowned in mud, Gon and his aunt disappearing under the murky brown waves. A lightning bolt slicing through the sky, striking their house dead on. Smoke and screams filling the inside of the little house.

Gon, his body crushed by rubble and framed by bright splashes of blood, the golden fire in his eyes fading away as he whispers,  _ I’m sorry, Killua. _

_ No. No.  _ No.

Killua tries to scream, but no sound comes out.

An eerie wailing rises up from below, carrying the sound of snapping trees along.

The face in the clouds smiles. “Look at that, Kil. You’re becoming the storm I always knew you would be.”

***

In the end, only one person died.

An elderly man on the outskirts of Whale Rock Lake, he had fallen asleep in his rocking chair without his hearing aids and hadn’t heard the tornado sirens when they started.

His daughter took him off life support a few days later.

He hadn’t had a chance to run. 

***

Mito and Gon stand in the half-destroyed farmland the morning after the tornado, surveying the destruction. Both their house and the center of the town—the motel and Baptist church, the gas station and car repair place and supermarket—have escaped destruction, save for some flooding in the church basement, as well as most of the other houses on the outskirts of the city. The only casualties were one old farmhouse and a great deal of soybeans—

And one man.

She’s out there right now, lugging bits and pieces of this dead man’s livelihood out of the mud alongside several of the church ladies, the sort that wore tweed pantsuits every and pearls, the sort that wrote Christian alternatives for  _ Harry Potter _ and carried their Bibles around in their purse and thought “vagina” was a cuss word.

She can feel them staring at her, and at Gon, boring holes into their skin. She’s used to it—after all, she’d been tolerating their glares, their half-concealed cuts and whispers behind hands for years, ever since she’d turned up unmarried and thirteen with an infant Gon under her arm, proudly refusing to answer their gossip and probing eyes.

_ I can’t believe it. She seemed like such a  _ promising  _ girl… _

_ Well, it can’t be helped. It’s a pity, it really is, what with that family of hers.  _

_ See, this is what happens when you raise children without Christian values. I just hope the boy turns out okay… _

Mito grits her teeth at the memories and gives a sharp _ yank  _ on the shovel buried in the mud. It flies free with a loud  _ squelch _ , sending mud splattering onto her forehead.

She wipes it away and looks around at the destruction. At times like this, it’s hard not to despise nature. The house lies in shambles, its roof torn off, the four walls crumpled in like a stomped-in cardboard box. A man had died there, she knows, leaving his blood soaking through the old tweed recliner into the springs. 

Mito turns around, casting her gaze over the torn-up cornfield, the piles of brittle stalks cast around as if flung by the tantrum of a childish god. A speck of movement at the far end of the cornfield catchers her eye; a small figure silhouetted against the sky, his green jacket a stark contrast to the silvery clouds.

_ Gon…? _

Heedless of the rest of the cleaning crew’s protests, she drops the shovel and hurries towards him.

She finds him at the far end of the tornado’s track— _ he must’ve been wondering where the storm began— _ his head bowed as he turns something over in his right hand. 

“Gon, are you okay? Everyone’s wondering where you are…”

“I’m fine,” Gon answers, his voice flat. Small. “It’s just…” He turns to her, amber eyes bright with helplessness, the corners of his mouth falling into a frown. “Aunt Mito… what do you do when a friend does something bad?”

“Ah… Um.” Mito opens her mouth, than closes it again. She’d steadily been waiting, been hoping, praying,  _ pleading _ for the day when Gon would finally make a friend his own age, but now that it’s  _ here,  _ no words come. Not for the first time, she looks at her son and wishes motherhood had come with a map. “This isn’t one of the boys who dared you to hold the firework, is it?”

“No,  _ no!  _ It’s not like that at  _ all!”  _ The fire fades from Gon’s eyes as quickly as it appeared, and he once more turns his face to the ground, his scarred thumb absentmindedly tracing the edges of the thing he holds in his hand.

It’s a shard of glass, Mito notices. “It’s just…”

“Put the glass down.”

“Oh sorry, Aunt Mito.” The offending shard falls and lands, edge-first, in the mud, where it stands on end like a knife in wood. “It’s… someone else.”

“Someone else?” Mito echoes, taking in the faint flush coloring his cheeks, the way he can’t quite meet her eyes.  _ Oh shit. It’s a  _ girl.

Mito’s just about to dive into preparing a nice long lecture about the dangers of STDs and unplanned fatherhood and broken hearts when she hears Gon continuing, “Yeah. And… if my friend sorta did something bad—“ his eyes see  _ past _ her, to the broken barn beyond— “but I  _ knew  _ they could do better than this because they  _ really _ aren’t a bad person on the inside, they’re just alone and scared and  _ hurting _ and I want to  _ help _ them…” His voice trails off, and his gaze drifts from her to focus the ruined barn behind. “But like, the thing they did was… Pretty bad.”

_ He really cares for them.  _ Mito looks at her son, taking in his furrowed brow, his small shocked frown, the way his amber eyes brim with hurt.  _ Whoever it is… he wants to save them. As much as he can _ .

Her heart near to bursting with love for her boy, Mito has to force a note of seriousness into her voice as she says, “This person didn’t do anything illegal, did they?”

Silence.

The whisper of the cornhusks in the field around them, the shrill voices of the gossiping church ladies.

Gon grins, a shadow lurking behind his eyes. “Nope!”

_ Well, that’s good to know at least,  _ Mito thinks to herself, though she can’t shake the feeling that Gon isn’t telling her the complete truth. “Well…” she begins, the words slow, halting, “the hard thing is, there’s no way to  _ force  _ them to change.”

She thinks back to being thirteen—Gon’s age—thirteen and staring down at her cousin who’d abandoned her and abandoned their grandmother and abandoned his son; who’d left them behind in this forgotten town to chase his own dreams and never, never once looked back.  _ Just give me the boy,  _ she remembers screaming.  _ Better that than you forget him somewhere and finally get the abortion you begged his mother to get. _

“You can yell at someone all you want, and they don’t have to listen to you.” The words taste bitter on her tongue. “That’s one of the hard things about life.”

“Oh.”

A pause—and then she hears wet footfalls on the mud as Gon steps closer to her, putting his arm around her waist and leaning against her side. Mito smiles at his touch, and ruffles his hair with one hand while putting her other arm around his shoulders and giving them a comforting squeeze. “I know. It sucks. But it makes the people who  _ do  _ listen to you all the more special.”

“Are you gonna tell me again to listen to the special people?” Gon asks, a smile in his voice.

Mito chuckles. “Yes, if you want to keep them.” She pokes him lightly on the nose. “Which I’m assuming you do.”

“Hey!” Gon laughs, playfully swatting away her hand. “And you’re my mom. So of  _ course _ you’d say that.”

Mito grins and squeezes his shoulders. “I have to. It’s my job.”

As the two of them share a laugh, the sun bursts out from behind the clouds, filling their world with brilliant light. Mito feels Gon turn, slightly pulling away from her side. “So I can’t help him?”

_ Him.  _ Not a girl. Unless…

Mito swallows back the tide of worry threatening to choke her.  _ No. It’s not going to happen, it’s statistically unlikely anyways, and it’s healthy for him to have friends his own age. _

She cannot,  _ will  _ not think of the news stories she’d heard about gay men beaten and left for dead, of the snide remarks she’s heard the women in town making, of the way someone down the street had died when she was a child, died without love because his family said he was gay.

_ It won’t happen to him,  _ Mito tells herself, and tries to believe the words.

“Aunt Mito?”

“Oh…” Gon’s voice brings her back to reality, to the dirt squishing under her feet and the cloud-filtered sunshine at her back. “Well,” she begins, choosing her words carefully, “how would  _ you  _ want to be talked to if someone thought  _ you  _ were doing something bad?”

“Um,” Gon starts, his words halting, “if I did something bad…” He looks down at his hands, his shoulders hunched.

“Oh, Gon…” Mito swallows hard and steps over to  put her arm on his shoulder once more. “I didn’t mean it like  _ that…”  _ Her voice trails off, and she struggles to keep the tears from overflowing. “I know it’s hard. I know how much it hurts when something goes wrong.” The words sound small, helpless, even to her. “But… it’s the sad parts of life they make life worth living. They help us grow.”

She gently squeezes his shoulders. “It’s just like with people. If we didn’t have the bad ones, we wouldn’t be able to see the good.”

“And that’s what I think you need to do with your friend. So long as he isn’t pressuring  _ you  _ to do anything bad—“

“Nope!”

“And he’s not hurting  _ you,  _ is he?”

Gon shakes his head.

“Then I would say all you really can do is be there for him. Sooner or later, his bad decisions will come back to bite him, and he’ll need a friend when that happens. The most you can do is stay by his side, and be someone he turns to when he needs a hand. Be a good example. Show him that there’s  _ more  _ to life than whatever he’s doing, that there’s a future for him where he doesn’t have to hurt anyone. That’s all you can really do, in the end, and if he’s a good person for you, he’ll see how he’s hurting people and change. And you’ll be there for him when he does.” She gives his shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Because you’re his friend.”

***

_ I have to talk to him. _

It’s just a gentle storm Killua’s brought down this time; nothing like the sweeping storms he’d brought down earlier. The droplets fall from the sky in a silvery curtain, landing with a gentle  _ pit-pat  _ on the ground.

Killua peers down from the sky, noticing the way the plants beneath him seem to glow, their lush green almost impossibly vivid against the measured gray of the clouds. Memories spring to his mind—the first night he’d spent with Gon, the two of them laughing as they chased each other around Mito’s living room; the way they'd sprawled out on the floor, stomachs aching with sugar. 

The look in Gon’s eyes when Killua had told him he was a storm.

_ Like they’re almost glowing,  _ Gon had said.

Killua looks down at the green sweep of  _ life _ before him, replacing the dry, brown grass of that morning.

And understands.

Had  _ he _ done this? Had  _ he  _ brought the life back to the plains?

Killua steps out of the cloud. Concentrating the electricity and water vapor around him, he wills it into a roughly humanoid shape, then adds the little details: his wind-tousled white hair, his lips and eyes and teeth and clothes. It’s a crude facsimile of a human body—he’s still mostly water on the inside—but it’ll do.

For now. 

As he descends to earth, Killua’s eyes widen as he takes in the world around him—the little white-framed houses, the big red buildings watching over vast fields. The gliniting tower in the distance, a small white pinnacle with a cross, a narrow slab of stone connecting the gap between two hills with glittering machines racing across it.

_ Wow. _

_ I never really  _ looked…

He focuses his ears, taking in the sounds of the human world: the machines rushing across the bands of stone, the lowing of the cattle. 

There’s so much  _ life _ around. Killua breathes deeply—as a human, not as a storm. He feels the air flow into him, tastes the scent of the rain-soaked earth.

Killua lands in the middle of a field thick with tall grasses, each one of them perfectly identical. The strange plants tickle his thighs as he walks.

He flows across a fence and into another pasture. Here, horses drink from a pool silvery with clouds.

_ I did this. I brought them the water. _

_ Gon… thank you. _

Killua scans the field, the distant trees thick with leaves. Looking up, he sees the clouds begin to lighten, the blue sky appearing in a gap. His eyes drop back to the horizon, where blue and white meet green and brown.

_ Gon? Where are you now? _

The wind kicks up, sending a pulse of air that ripples across the horses’ pool, that rattled the tall, oddly symmetrical grass in the next field. Killua swallows hard, his heart longing to take to the sky and come to Gon again.

Would they embrace this time? Would Gon hug him, pulling Killua  into his arms the way he had seen the humans doing?

Once more, Killua takes to the sky. 

He rockets across the sky, skimming over the tops of trees and houses and fields—

And a huge bald spot, ripping through one of the meadows like a gash carved into the earth. Killua pauses in his flight.  _ What… _

The gash continues, he notices, through splintered trees and a torn-up fence, until it reaches what little is left of a house. Killua freezes, the worry making circles in his gut. He hits the ground with a bone-jarring  _ thump _ , stumbles, then starts running through the garden to the house.

He’s seen this kind of destruction before. He’d watched, countless times, as Illumi brought his clouds down to earth, as he tore through trees and buildings and humans  _ alike— _

But Illumi hadn’t made the tornado last time, Killua realized with a flash of horror. 

This was  _ him. _

Frantically, Killua digs through the wreckage, searching for any sign of Gon, of Mito, of the white home he’d loved. The half-destroyed house is nearly gone by now; all that’s left is the concrete foundation, the weather-warped floorboards and a few remnants of slumped-over walls. There are no family pictures, no fridge full of ice cream, no VCR or computer or any of the other things Gon had shown him the night they'd met.

The human who lived here was just… gone.

Killua knows destruction well enough to know that the person there had not survived.

Water spills from his eyes.  _ No. No. Please don’t let it be him please  _ please…

Was this what he was? Someone who could kill his best friend?

Someone who  _ would? _

***

Fifteen minutes later, Killua’s managed to convince himself that the house in question was  _ not,  _ in fact, Gon and Mito’s house. The floor is different, fuzzy and gray instead of hard and brown; there’s one less room and no front porch. But, though the knowledge helps settle him, stopping the clouds from knotting again above his head, it does nothing to ease the steady, persistent tendril of guilt knotting within him.

What if it had been Gon?

What if it would be, someday?

_ Would he still want to see me if I’m like this? _

***

“Illumi!”

The gray storm turns. “What is it, Kil?” he says in a voice that sounds like he’d rather be doing literally  _ anything  _ else.

“Can I—I mea, the storm I made last time was powerful…”

“How powerful.” Illumi’s eyes bore down on him, watching intently as Killua squirms.

“Someone died.”

“How do you know.”

“I—I saw their house, with all this red stuff on the floor…” Killua sucks in a breath. “The house had collapsed. Humans are weak,” Killua continues, parroting Illumi’s words back at him and hating himself for it all the more. “He would have broken—when I hit the house I mean. It would’ve fallen on him and…” Beneath the two of them, rain falls like tears. “I killed someone. A  _ human.”  _ He makes the word sound like a curse. “They’re dead because of  _ me—my  _ storm.”

Illumi is still silent.

“So let me go alone. Let me make the storm’s by myself. I can do it—I’ll destroy  _ everything you want, _ just  _ let _ me go alone.”

“Very well.”

Thunder booms. Killua feels something within him drop in shock. He tries very hard to keep the glee out of his voice as he says, “Really…?”

“It’s clear you want to be human.”

“I never—“

A roar of thunder cuts off Killua’s words. “Don’t think I don’t know the way you look down at earth. Don’t think I don’t know where you go when you’re not with me.”

Killua freezes. Hailstones form.

“But you deserve to see what the human world is like. So go off, and make your storms, and see the human world for yourself.”

_ I can be with him. I can be with Gon. _

Something bright and  _ warm _ expands within him, flooding him with light. If he had a face, Killua would smile. “That’s—I mean, Thank you, Illumi. I won’t let you down.”

But the other storm gives no response.

***

Gon takes to sitting outside during storms.

He watches the sky with his heart pounding, anxious eyes scanning the sky for any hint of his lightning boy. It worries Mito—her boy comes in rain-soaked and bruised from hailstones, sticks and leaves caught in his wind-tousled hair.

As spring lengthens into summer, the storms become less violent, something that lets her galloping heart slow. It’s just a phase, she tells herself—Gon has discovered a newfound interest in meteorology from his time working on the science project, and he is simply letting that play out. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

She continues on thinking that right up until the fourth storm after the tornado had hit. She looks up from where she’s elbow -deep in dishwater to see a spark of light floating outside the window, just above their yard. It hovers, like a firefly or alien spacecraft, for a second—

And then begins to change.

The light shifts, seeming to— _ unfold,  _ almost, as if it’s been folded into a very tight space. Mito gasps, the pot she’s been washing clattering into the sink—but then her voice is cut off by a dark human form racing across the lawn toward the light.

_ Gon…? _

Hardly daring to breathe, Mito puts down the sponge and creeps to the door.  _ Is he safe?! Is he alright?! _

_ Is he seeing this too? _

She opens the door, wincing at its long, drawn out  _ creak,  _ then tiptoes around the corner of the house.

There’s another boy beside Gon—or so she thinks, for the boy standing hand-in-hand with her son is almost too ethereal to be human. His white hair, fluffy like a summer cloud, glows with a light of his own; the deep azure of his eyes seems to stare right into her soul.

The moment he sees her, Gon’s face lights up. “Aunt Mito! This is my friend Killua!” He runs over to take her by the hand, then pulls her across the lawn towards the shining boy. “Killua, this is my Aunt Mito. The one I told you about! She’s  _ really cool.” _

_ So this is him. _

The boy she had heard Gon laughing with at night, the person he had been sneaking off to meet. The boy who had brought life, brought color back to her son, who had lit up his eyes and put the energy back in his voice. 

And he glows like a star.

This sort of thing never happened, she knows. The supernatural doesn’t exist. She’d given up on believing in magic long ago, after her parents had died and Ging had left for parts unknown, after day after day had left without a single letter from her cousin. After he’d turned up with a baby and she and their grandmother had fought him tooth and nail for Gon.

This couldn’t be real. It has to be some sort of trick of the light, some clever special effect. The boy gazing at her son so intently couldn’t possibly be real, be glowing, be here at all. “Does Killua—“ even the foreign name fits strangely on her tongue like a chafing new shoe— “live near here? Does he go to school?”

“Well…” A pause, and she sees Gon look at his feet. “It’s a bit hard to explain…” he looks up at her, his amber eyes catching the lightning, bright like fireflies. “Mito, would you believe me if I told you he was a storm?”

“Like a stormy personality?”

“No. He—” She blinks, and Killua is gone.

Or not gone.

Turned into mist.

A cloud shaped boy hovers on her lawn, catching the light flooding out from the window, his body shimmering with a faint rainbow. Mito gasps.

_ So this is real. _

There was a little slice of reality where magic was real, after all. And she’d found it. 

Mito feels her heart beginning to pound, feels a smile spreading across her cheeks. Killua rematerializes, then stuffs both of his hands in his pocket, every bit the picture of a sullen teenage boy. 

Years ago, she would have claimed herself foolish for accepting her eyes, now, for not immediately declaring herself crazy. Years ago, she would have told Gon  _ get back in the house right now _ lest he catch the thirst for adventure his father had carried and go sailing off to some strange faraway place. But  _ now— _

“This is Killua,” she hears Gon say, as he walks over to take her hand in his. His scars are rough on her palm. Gon places her hand in Killua’s. The strange boy’s skin is much cooler than any human’s— _ because of  _ course _ he’s not human— _ could ever be. He buzzes faintly with electricity, like touching a staticky sheet. Mito raise her head, looks up into Killua’s ig ocean-blue eyes.

“Killua wants to be human,” she hears Gon say. “Do human kid stuff like going to school, but he doesn’t have any place to stay. So is it alright if he stays with us for a bit? He doesn’t eat—well, except when he wants to,” Gon finishes, chuckling slightly, his eyes soft as he gazes at Killua.

“Well,” Mito says, her smiler broadening, impossible to be suppressed, “we  _ do  _ have a spare bedroom—”

“So you’re Mito?” Killua says in a tone that indicates exactly zero respect towards adult authority.

“Indeed I am.” She feels a sense of light spreading within her heart as she looks at her son’s first friend, his best friend. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Killua.”


	4. Chapter 4

“Killua! Killua!”

The door of the boys’ room is flung open with a  _ crash,  _ landing with a  _ thump  _ on the far wall _.  _  Killua looks up from the comic book he had been reading to see Gon burst in, his shirt slick with sweat. “Aunt Mito just got the call from the doctors and—” he gasps— ‘I can swim now! I thought I wouldn’t be able to!”

Swimming.

He has no frame of reference for the word, no mental picture for whatever  _ swimming  _ is _. Another thing I didn’t know.  _

It’s not that it isn’t fun being with Gon. It  _ is-— _ he cherishes every moment the two of them spend together, laughing and wrestling and just talking, wanting to write them on his heart. It’s a miracle, every day; and he had never once imagined that his life would be as wonderful as  _ this. _

_ But… will I ever truly be human? _

He feels as though he’s become one of the puzzle pieces Gon had showed him last rainy day, one who didn’t quite fit into their hole, the layers of cardboard fraying at the edges. The more he learns about the human world, the more there  _ is  _ to learn, and he feels like he’ll never catch up- that he’ll always be left behind no matter how much Gon touches him. “What’s swimming?”

“I’ll show you.” With a sunlike smile, Gon steps over and takes him by the hand, pulling him up off the bed. Not for the first time, Killua notices the thick scars  on the palms of Gon’s hands, the way all but two of his fingers end in shiny red nubs. 

He notices the way Gon looks at their joined hands then looks away.

“Ready?” says Gon, the light returning to his eyes. Killua nods, and Gon pulls him out of their room at a breakneck pace, tossing his shirt off in the process. “You’re going to  _ love s _ wimming!”

Breathlessly, Gon leads him out the door. 

To the lake dock.

And then pushes him into the water.

Water can’t hurt him—Killua is a  _ storm, _ after all, he’s  _ made  _ of water. He lets his human form dissolve and floats gracefully  just above the surface of the water, watching the sunlight beneath him dim. Fish congregate in the new shadow, and frogs, thinking it's dusk, begin to sing.

“Killua, no fair!”

Killua looks back to find Gon pouting. He circles back, taking on his human form once again as he lands in the dock beside Gon. “Did I do it wrong?” 

“That’s not how  _ humans  _ swim,” Gon says. “Here,I’ll show you.” Gon take a few steps back on the dock, then starts running at full speed toward the water. 

He jumps. 

He lands with a  _ splash,  _ shattering the rippling mirror of the waters surface, then resurfaces, shaking algae out of his hair. “Come on, Killua! The water great!”

_ Oh. _

Killua feels a smile spread across his face—slowly at first, then catching like a wildfire, spreading until his cheeks ache. He runs and jumps, the same way he had seen Gon do, and lands with a splash.

_ Oh!  _

The water is cold, a sharp, world-unshaping break from the sunshine, and it rushes past him,  finding its way into his nose, his eyes, his ears. He has _weight_ , he realizes—the water rises past him. 

He’s sinking. 

_ Is this what water feels like for humans? _

His feet touch the bottom, and he rises, sitting as he takes a welcome breath of air. “How was it?” Gon says, an infectious grin curling his cheeks. 

“Cold,” Killua replies. “But fun.”

“Wanna race?”

Killua looks at the sunlit expanse of water around them, and smiles. He’s never seen the sky like this: from the ground, reflected in the shimmering surface of the lake, holding a gleaming mirror up to the sun and clouds and trees.

Something grabs his foot.

Killua almost squeals—but a moment later, Gon comes up spluttering, shaking water from his hair. His arms are warm around Killua’s waist.

They smile at each other before Gon dunks him, and they come up spluttering and wrestling and grinning, their backs warm with the heat of the sun.

***

“And... humans have this thing called a heartbeat?”

They’re sitting on the log swing above the lake, two days after Gon had taught him how to swim. It’s a brilliant day—the sun shines almost too brightly to be real, bouncing off the water at their feet like light off a diamond. 

Gon nods. “Yep! It pushes the blood—all that runny red stuff that flows out when someone gets hurt—around your body, and it makes this  _ dump-dump _ noise all the time. That’s your heartbeat.”   
Killua looks down at the sparkling lake beneath his feet. He kicks at the water, breaking the surface into a thousand fractal shards of light.    
_ A heartbeat. One more thing I didn’t know. _ _   
_ _ Illumi was right, _ he tries, and fails, to stop himself from thinking.  _ I’m not _ really  _ a human. _   
“Killua?”   
Killua starts, looking up at his friend. Unconsciously, he finds his eyes sweeping Gon’s body, tracing the beads of water highlighting his friend’s bare chest, the curve of his throat.   
Gon doesn’t look quite like the boy he’d been when they’d met. There’s a hint of masculinity in him now—he’s a little more muscular, his voice slightly deeper, the angle of his jaw beginning to sharpen. And Killua doesn’t know  _ why _ those little  _ stupid _ changes in Gon make him feel the way he does, like the world’s flipping upside down and he’s falling and flying all in one; all he knows is that it’s dumb, and he doesn’t necessarily  _ want _ to feel this way.   
_ A heartbeat _ .   
Does Gon have one hidden in his chest?   
“And it makes a sound?” Killua says, and curses himself for sounding like a dork.   
“Yep! Want to hear?”   
Gon is blushing as he says the words.   
Killua swallows. And nods.   
The two boys turn to face each other. Their eyes meet, gold against blue.   
And Gon reaches up and places both of his hands on Killua’s shoulders. Killua gasps a little, giving off a faint glow at the touch—Gon’s touched him many times, but it’s never felt  __ quite like this. Without words, Killua understands.   
He brings his head down, lets his ear rest against Gon’s chest, right over his heart.

The heat, the water running off Gon’s skin. Killua drinks him in, reveling in the simple, brilliant warmth Gon always brings him.  _ You make me glad I exist. _

And below that, the steady throb of the muscle keeping Gon alive.   
Humans were so fragile, Illumi had said.   
He'd never been told that they were so strong as well.   
Gon’s arms wrap around him, holding him tight, keeping him safe under the warm sun.   
Killua knows he’s not human. That he’ll never have a heart.   
But, in that moment, Gon’s heart is strong enough for both of them. 

***

It’s three days after the start of school when Gon kisses him for the first time. 

The two boys are wandering home from Bisky’s Amazing World of Ice Cream on the way home, and now both boys stand with globs of melted sugary goodness dripping down their chins—chocolate raspberry for Killua, watermelon for Gon, to land on the weed-cracked crumbling concrete below. The sun hangs low in the sky, casting its amber rays of light, making the shadows of people, trees, and houses stretch out like ribbons.

“Hey, Killua,” Gon begins, in that too-bright tone of his, “have you ever thought of kissing someone?” 

Killua nearly drops his cone. “Wha- _ what?!  _ No  _ way!  _ Why  _ would  _ I?!”

“I just…” Gon stops and looks down at the pavement, nudging a pebble of concrete with his shoe. “Some of the guys in the locker room during gym class were talking about it, about how nice it was, with girls I mean, and I've never really done it, so I wouldn't know…”

“Well why would you ask  _ me?”  _ Killua doesn’t  _ intend  _  to snap the words, but that’s how they come out, as if he’s desperately protecting some wound deep inside of him. “I've never been with a girl. I've never even  _ wanted  _ to be—and anyways, you  _ know _ that. The whole time I’ve been human—”  _ the whole time I’ve  _ tried _ to be human— _ “I've been with you.”

Gon shrugs, and starts walking again. “I… just thought you might? Like you seem so cool…”

_ He thinks I’m  _ cool? Killua feels a little spark of lightning—static, really–race down his spine. He starts to float, his sneakers trembling only inches off the ground.

“Whoa, Killua, you’re dematerializing!”

The rays of light from the sun touch him—and when Killua looks down, he sees a rainbow in his hands. Gon blushes, then looks up to meet his eyes. “Killua, are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.” With effort, Killua forces himself back into a human form, nervously glancing away from Gon and rubbing the back of his head. “It’s just… you startled me. With all that talk about kissing, I mean.”

“Oh, so you  _ have  _ thought about it!”

Killua grits his teeth. “No—I mean, not really. People total about it and stuff, but—“  _ what would it be like to kiss Gon? Would his lips be soft would they taste like watermelon ice cream, would he kiss me  _ back— “I mean, I’m a storm.”

“I knew that.”

“And it’s just some stupid human thing,” Killua challenges, hoping against hope that Gon wouldn’t notice the way he’s sparking. “Honestly,” he says, sharpening his smile into a cocky smirk— “do you humans  _ really  _ find it fun? Standing there slobbering into each other’s mouths? What if they have bad breath or don’t brush their teeth—“

“Then you don’t kiss them, silly!”

_ Oh.  _ “How do you  _ know  _ if someone has bad breath before you kiss them?” He thinks back to his first night with Gon, how Gon had told him how to smell. “Do you like, ask them to breathe into your face?”

Gon giggles a little. “Well, I don’t really know, but I would guess it happens when you lean in to kiss them. Like when you see adults in movies staring into each other’s eyes, and their faces get all close, right before they kiss? That’s probably it.”

“Have  _ you  _ ever kissed anyone, Gon?”

“Nope!” His cheeks flush red, and he puts one hand to the back of his neck. “I’d  _ like  _ to, someday, though. With the right person.” 

_ The right person.  _ This faceless girl in Killua’s mind instantly becomes the target of a metric ton of barely acknowledged rage. “How will you know who the right person  _ is?” _

Gon blinks. “Well… um. I’d want them to be someone I can laugh with. Someone who’s the same sort of stupid as me, and who likes the same stuff, like hanging out outside and swimming. And I’d want them to be someone I could trust. Aunt Mito says you should always trust your friends, and I wouldn’t want to be in love with someone who isn’t a friend. So… yeah.” He shrugs, a small, embarrassed smile on his face. “That’s pretty much it.”

_ A friend. Someone I can trust. _

Killua feels like he’s about to burst.  _ Could you trust me like that, Gon?  _ he thinks, desperately wishing that somehow, the other boy might magically hear his thoughts.  _ Ever? _

“What about you, Killua?”

Killua drops his gaze, stares down at the sidewalk and watches the weeds growing, inch by inch, through the cracks. “Storms don’t need to have babies. And when we  _ do,  _ we don’t need another storm. So it’s a stupid question.”

A small, hurt swallow from Gon. Killua instantly wonders whether he’s gone too far.

A pair of scarred palms clasp his own hands between them; Killua looks up to see Gon backlit by the afternoon sun, his amber eyes soft and sparkling. With an energy of their own. “But you said you wanted to be human, right, Killua?” 

“Yes.” Killua feels his nonexistent heart constrict.  _ I want it so badly it hurts.  _ “But I can’t ever  _ really  _ be human. So it’s pointless for me to talk about kissing.”

“Why is it?”

“Hah?” 

“Even if you can’t have kids with them, that doesn’t matter. Aunt Mito says  _ plenty  _ of people are in love without having kids.” Gon’s eyes are locked onto his own, seemingly staring down into Killua’s soul. “So…  _ would  _ you want to kiss someone? If you really liked them?” 

“Yes. No. Maybe. I guess. It’s still drooling into other people’s mouths.”

_ Other people.  _

He’d called himself a human. 

Killua’s cheeks flame at the realization, and he wants to run, to turn back into the breeze and let the wind carry him far, far away, somewhere where Illumi could never find him. 

It’s pathetic to try and outrun the sky, he knows. “Why do  _ you  _ want to kiss people so bad, anyways?”

“I don’t… know?” Killua can almost see the wheels in Gon’s brain turning. “I just think it would be fun to do with someone I really loved.”

“There’s no one you want to kiss right  _ now,  _ is there?” The words come out harsher than Killua intends. He looks away, bracing himself for Gon’s hurt tone.

It never comes.

When his eyes meet Gon’s again, the other boy is starting at him with the same expression he’d worn in the first night they’d met—wonderment and fear and awe all rolled into one.

Killua feels a chill run through him. Gon’s eyes, if he lets himself dream, are their own tiny sunset, and he feels himself crackle with sparks, feels like he’s flying once more.

_ I wish I had a heartbeat. _

Gon seems to realize he’s staring, and quickly drops his gaze. Killua studies his shoes. 

“So, I was just wondering… would you like to try kissing, Killua?”

Killua jerks upright. “Hah?”

“Well, I mean…” Gon shifts his weight from side to side on the balls of his feet. “Well be in high school next year, and I bet a lot of the boys have  _ already  _ kissed girls. And I…” His cheeks turn pink. “I mean I’ll probably mess it up—when a girl wants to kiss me I mean. I might bite her or something.”

“So you want to practice on me.” A strange sort of emptiness settles in Killua’s heart as he says the words. He tries, valiantly, to not think of Gon locked in a passionate embrace with a girl who had never  _ understood  _ him, who flinched at the touch of his hands. “Isn’t there some other pair of lips around?”

“Well, yes but… You’re my best friend, Killua! And so I’d want it to be you.”

Killua gasps.  _ He wants it to be me. _

_ He wants to  _ kiss  _ me. _

Once more, Killua feels like he might float away. Everything in him itches to reach out and touch Gon, to put his ear to his chest and listen to his human’s heartbeat, to hold his hands and caress the scars.

_ He wants to kiss me. _

Killua swallows hard.

The two boys come to a stop, nervously gazing into each other’s eyes. Killua sees Gon lick his lips, wonders if he should do the same.

They’re standing a few feet apart, but even from this distance, Killua can feel the warmth from Gon. 

_ He’s nervous. _

Even from this far away, Gon is  _ radiant. _

Killua takes a step forward, as hesitantly as if the sidewalk was made from glass. Gon follows him, stepping forward to meet him, their bodies now only inches apart.

It would be so  _ easy,  _ Killua thinks, to wrap his hands around Gon and pull him close, their chests pressed together, Gon’s heart beating against his own. It would be so easy to gently trace the lines of Gon’s back, his shoulders, his neck, to lean down and press their lips together…

A gentle touch on his hand, and Killua looks down to see Gon’s hands cradling his own. “Um,” Gon mumbles in the back of his throat, “how are we going to do this?”

Killua lets out a shaky breath. He wants to feel Gon, feel every last bit of him pressed against this fake body of his. He can't explain it—it’s stupid, it makes zero sense, but it’s  _ there _ , burning hot inside him, stubbornly refusing to go away.

_ Why do I want him like this? _

Gon looks up at Killua, his skin bronze in the late afternoon light, his eyes bright like fireflies. Killua closes his fingers around Gon’s hand, feels Gon exhale close enough to fill the other boy’s warm breath on his lips.

_ He’s so warm… _

Killua squeezes Gon’s hand tighter, as if to keep himself from floating off into space.

And closes his eyes. 

And then Gon’s lips are on his own, warm and soft and tasting of watermelon ice cream, his pulse fluttering frantically beneath his skin. Killua feels sparks crackle inside of him, the air flipping over itself in his gut. 

He wants to  _ melt  _ into Gon, wishes this kiss could bind them forever.  _ Should I open my mouth? Kiss him harder? Would he want that?  _

And the sun falls on two boys standing on the sidewalk, hand in hand, their lips pressed together as the melting ice cream splashes, drip by drip, onto the crumbling sidewalk below. 

***

Mito notices it the second he gets back to the house: Gon’s bright smile, the faint blush on his cheeks, the way he seems to float on air. 

_ He has a crush. _

“You seem happy, Gon,” she says, looking up from her laundry as her son comes in the door. “You have fun today?”

“Yep,” Gon mutters, barely managing to meet her eyes before bolting for his room.

She smiles.

***

After his shower, Gon lies on the bed in the dark, his arms and legs spread wide, his skin damp from the shower and cooling in the night air.

The gentle flash of distant heat lightning outside the window, far too far away to bring thunder. Gon turns his head to the side to look at the sky, his eyes following the wispy strands of clouds and the glittering stars through the crack in the window blinds.

_ Killua. _

His lightning boy is out there, somewhere.  _ Are you staring up at the sky, too?  _ he wonders.  _ Do you miss me? _

He closes his eyes, imagines Killua lying beside him, the staticky sheets tangled around them. 

Would they kiss again, then? 

Gon tries to set the scene in his mind: Killua and he, on the bed—no the beanbag chair in the corner of his room. They would be holding each other—hugging, he supposes, though he doesn’t really know. 

How  _ did  _ two people hold each other, anyways? How was it that two boys could fit together perfectly, like puzzle pieces or keys?

Gon’s heart is racing. 

He raises his right hand to his lips, runs his finger over the skin Killua had kissed, his lips tasting of chocolate and hazelnuts and rain. What would it be like to kiss Killua again, he wonders, to murmur little words into his mouth and steal that last little bit of ice cream from him.

Killua might try and get it back, he imagines. He’d have to kiss him harder, the lightning flailing within him tingling in Gon’s skin wherever they touched.

Gon almost can feel his storm’s lightning  _ now,  _ as he lies in bed and feels his body light up with the memory of Killua’s touch.

***

“Aunt Mito?”

They’re driving to school the next morning, the rain beating steadily down on the car roof to run in thick world-blurring rivulets down the glass. Mito watches as Gon, seated in the passenger seat beside her, raises one hand to trace the ribbons of water flowing down the windshield, his hand leaving a smudged outline of fog behind.

“Hm?”

Gon looks at the floor. “Um… Aunt Mito, I have something kinda big to tell you.” He straightens his hunched back and swallows visibly, as if to drink courage from the air. “I think I might be…”

The rain beats the roof.

“Gay.”

So there it was.

What she’d suspected all along has been laid out in front of her, plain as day. Mito looks over at Gon, feels her heart crumble as she takes in the way his shoulders are drawn, the way he stubbornly refuses to meet her eyes. 

“Are you sure?”

Gon nods.

And in an utterly reckless move, Mito takes her arm off the steering wheel and wraps it around her son’s shoulders.

Gon’s shaky intake of breath, and Mito finds a pair of wide, sparkling golden eyes looking into her own. “You’re not… not mad?”

“Why would I be?” With her other hand, she steers the car onto the shoulder of the road, rests her foot on the brakes until it stops. She leans across the console, pulling her boy into her arms. “I’ll  _ always _ love you, no matter what. No matter who you love. If you like boys, that’s fine. And if you turn out to like girls, or both or neither or people who aren’t girls  _ or  _ boys, that’s fine too.” She hugs him tighter as wet tears slide down his cheeks. “Honestly, when people put too much stock into who other people love, it's usually because they have no love to give of their own.” 

Gon is silent in her arms, and for a second Mito wonders if she’s said the wrong thing. But then Gon leans across the console and wraps his arms around her neck, pressing his head into her side. “Thanks, Aunt Mito!”

He still doesn’t call her “mom”.

“It’s Killua, isn’t it?” Mito says after a pause.

Gon lets out a little squeaking laugh, like air escaping from a punctured inflatable, and promptly turns pink. “How did you know?”

“I’m not blind, you know.” Mito laughs and ruffles his hair. “I can see it in your eyes, the way you look at him… It’s a special thing, you know. To find love so young.” She kisses him on the forehead. “Take care of him, okay? And make sure he’s taking care of you.”

***

The first time they hold hands is beneath the first rainbow Killua makes—Gon whispers  _ wow, Killua, it’s amazing  _ and before he knows it, a scarred, fingerless hand is slipping into his own. 

Killua blushes, and tries to pull away, but Gon’s smile is bright, his eyes shining like the sun.

Like the beams of rainbow light gracing the clouds. 

_ If I’m your hands,  _ Killua thinks as Gon leans in to press their cheeks together,  _ then will you be my heart? _

And there they stand, two boys beneath a rainbow, facing the world together hand in hand. 


End file.
